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Recent
Stories
April
1, 2003
William
S. Lind
The Pitfalls of War Planning
Jorge
Mariscal
Latinos on the Frontlines, Again
Paul
de Rooij
Arrogant Propaganda
Jo
Wilding
From Baghdad: "I Am His Mother"
Tarif
Abboushi
Operation Embedded Folly
Lee
Sustar
Labor's War at Home
Akiva Eldar
Israeli Dreams of Iraqi Oil
Bernard
Weiner
The Vietnam Connection
Robert
Fisk
The Graveyard at Baghdad's North
Gate
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/01
March
31, 2003
David
Lindorff
Liberating Iraqis from Their Homes
Neve Gordon
A Different Kind of Despair
John
Chuckman
Absurdities and Contradictions
Ron Jacobs
Bernie Sanders Voting Maybe on
War
Wayne
Madsen
The Siege of Washington
Mark Franchetti
Slaughter at the Bridge of Death
Robert
Fisk
Blood and Bandages of the Innocent
Robin Cook
Send Our Soldiers Home
Anthony
Gancarski
Investigate Perle
Uri Avnery
The Devil's Dictionary
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 03/31
March
29, 2003
Kathy and
Bill Christison
"Like Being Autistic with
Power": an Interview with Jeff Halper
Ben
Tripp
"My Empire for a Map!": Geography
American Style
Ann Harrison
The War on Protesters: San Francisco's
Berserk Cops
Kurt
Nimmo
Dead People: Don't Go There
Chris Floyd
Blood on the Tracks: Cheney the
War Profiteer
Ann
Pettifer
Israelis: Victims No Longer?
Jo Wilding
Dispatch from Baghdad: Nowhere
is Safe
Ramzy
Baroud
Horror Chamber: Inside the Al-Amiriya
Shelter
David Krieger
Perle is Gone, But the Looting
Continues
John
Gershman
Dreams of Empire; Eulogies for International
Law
Robert
Fisk
Bombing the Phone System
Brice Abel
War, Bush and the Jesus Torilla
Tom
Stephens
The Chickenhawk Circle of Hell
Alexander
Cockburn
"War Not Going According
to Plan"
March 28,
2003
Robert
Fisk
Bitter Truths About Basra
Daniel
Wolff
A Road Trip in Wartime
Chris
Clarke
We Never Spit on Any Baby Killers
David Lindorff
Saddam, a Hero Made in Washington
Pierre
Tristam
Icarus on Crack: American Hubris
and Iraq
Jason Leopold
Richard Perle: the Enterprising
Hawk
Saul
Landau
Technological Massacre
Carol Norris
The Mother of All Bombs
Riad
Abdelkarim, MD
Iraq War Lingo 101
Adam Engel
Schlock and Awe
Steve
Perry
War Web Log
March 27,
2003
Anthony
Gancarski
Somebody Blew Up Baghdad
Rahul
Mahajan
The New Humanitarianism: Basra as
Military Target
Simon Jones
A Letter from Uzbekistan
William
S. Lind
No Exit
Diane Christian
A Day of Reckoning
The
Black Commentator
Onward
Embedded Soldiers: the Press and the War
Mickey
Z.
Remembering the Real Moynihan:
Genocide in East Timor
Richard
Thieme
The Problem of Empathy
Jason Leopold
Energy Scams: Bilking California
Out of Billions
Tariq
Ali
A Naked Display of Imperial Power
Alexander
Cockburn
Up the Creek
March 26,
2003
Bruce Jackson
A Battlefield from Hell
Pablo
Mukherjee
Watch
Their Lips
David Krieger
Shock But Not Awe
Linda
Heard
Winning
Hearts and Minds Bush-Style
Imad Jadaa
The Beautiful Face of America
Adam
Engel
Buckets
of Blood
Patrick
Cockburn
Kurds Unimpressed
David
Lindorff
POWs,
Torture and Hypocrisy
Robert
Fisk
The Coup That Didn't Happen
April
Hurley, MD
A
Doctor's Outrage in Baghdad
Gloria
Bergen
Chretien's Shame
Reema
Abu Hamdieh
The
Smell of Death Surrounds Me
March 25,
2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Life During Wartime
Gary
Leupp
What
Democracy Looks Like: the Streets of Cairo
Bill and
Kathleen Christison
An Interview with Hanan Ashrawi
Bruce
Jackson
Why
Protest? Why Write?
Uri Avnery
Bitter Rice: Thoughts and Warnings
on the War
Jason
Leopold
Blood
Indicator: Casualties and the Stock Market
Ralph Nader
A Pre-emptive War on a Defenseless
Country
March 24,
2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Ominous Signs
David
Lindorff
Peacekeepers
at Ground Zero
Diane Christian
Blood Sacrifice
Kathy
Kelly
The
Morning After Shock and Awe
John Stanton
US Bombs Iran
Wayne
Madsen
How
to Live with a Rogue Superpower
Anthony
Gancarski
Iraq and the Death of the West
David
Vest
Earth vs. Bush
Ahmad Faruqui
The Liberation of Iraq in Perspective
Robert
Fisk
We
Bomb, They Suffer
March 22 / 23, 2003
Edward Said
The Other
America
Saul Landau
The Threats of Empire
Kathleen and Bill Christison
On the Road in the West Bank
Joanne Mariner
Suing Seymour Hersh
Ann Harrison
The Battle of San Francisco
Robert Fisk
A Cauldron of Fire
Hani Shukrallah
The Gates of Hell
Chris Floyd
Memory Lane
Kathy Kelly
Imagine Chicago Under This Kind of Attack
Ramzi Kysia
Bombing Away a Chance for Joy
Linda Heard
Baghdad Burns While Bush Does Lunch
Bradley Burston
Could the US be at War for Years?
Salvador Peralta
Mass Murder as Liberation?
Tom Gorman
Now That's a Coalition!
Jorge Mariscal
Johnny Mack, When Are You Coming Back?
Cindy Milstein
The Grassroots Go Global
Josh Frank
Blocking Portland's Bridges
Elaine Cassel
The Case of Elizabeth Smart: Kidnapping and Insanity
Gordon Solberg
Drowning in Niceness: the Lessons of Elizabeth Smart
Tom Crumpacker
Getting to Know the Real Havana
Poets' Basement
Dobie, Guthrie, Alam, Wechsler
March 21, 2003
Ben Tripp
Blood
for Oil: the Exchange Rate
Cathy Breens
Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
Scott Handleman
Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
Vanessa Jones
Paint
Them Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic
Protest for Professors
Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz-Coup
Pepe Escobar
A Cheap Family Farce
Floyd Rudmin
The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
Chris Floyd
See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
March 20, 2003
Jo Wilding
From
Waiting to War: a Day and a Night in Baghdad
Stephen Banko
I Was
a Soldier Once
Kevin Alexander Gray
How Did
We Become an Outlaw Nation?
Shane Claiborne
Nomadic
Solidarity: Glimpses of Life in Baghdad on the Eve of War
Kathy Kelly
Waiting on the Baghdad Skies to Crack
Anthony Gancarski
Michelle
Makin's "Liberty Shields"
Rahul Mahajan and Robert
Jensen
Myths
and Facts About the War on Iraq
Jason Leopold
Cheney's
Lies About Halliburton and Iraq
Ron Jacobs
If War is Business as Usual, There Should be No Business as Usual
Chuck O'Connell
Predictions About the Iraq War
Douglas Herman
US Air Force Veteran on the Coming Air Campaign
Ralph Nader
Come
On Democrats, Stand Up for Peace
William Hughes
War is Theft
Sima Saeedi
Dispatch
from Iran
Hammond Guthrie
John Philip Sousa
Website of the Day
Iraq
Body Count
Hot Stories
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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April 2,
2003
Truth and Subterfuge
Cows and Armed Guards
on a College Campus
By ROBERT FISK
It was a most peculiar day. Overnight, the Americans
had pulverised a neo-Classical office block next to what was--before
a previous pulverisation--the Iraqi government's Department of
Air Armaments.
Then, just before 10am yesterday, an
aircraft could be heard diving high over Baghdad and a clap of
sound from the other side of the Tigris, with the usual grey-black
column of smoke, signalled the end of another annexe belonging
to the sons of Saddam. Then came the bus trip. The Iraqis wanted
to take the press to see another example of US and British "imperialist-racist
violence" and so we were trucked off to the outskirts of
the city, to the campus of what was described as a ladies education
college. Campus it was, with agricultural blocks and plant testing
fields and a perimeter of palm groves. And the crime against
humanity to which we were taken? A large crater in the lawn beside
a women's dormitory, a hundred smashed windows and some broken
power lines. A hundred metres away, I found four black and white
cows tethered in the grass and, perhaps 30 feet from the crater,
a slit trench with sand-bags; surely, we told ourselves, an ordinary
part of any college campus.
Now let's be fair. College staff have
every right to take their own protection against America's notoriously
inaccurate "smart" bombs. But did they dig the slit
trench? Did they park the civilian trucks and buses, scattered
around the empty campus, 30 metres from each other and always
under the foliage of trees? And if college personnel normally
worked the gates, why was the campus guarded  by armed and green-uniformed militiamen?
The crater was 20ft deep--the classic cruise missile's gouge
in the ground--and its blast was enormous. Internal doors were
torn from their hinges, desks overturned, beds thrown across
rooms. But no one was hurt; indeed, the college had been abandoned
long before the attacks.
Now fast-forward to a press conference
a couple of hours later by the ubiquitous, bespectacled and uniformed
minister of information, Mohamed Saeed al-Sahaf, who announced
casualties in Baghdad for the previous 36 hours of air raids
as 125 wounded and 24 dead.
His figures for other governorates were,
of course, somewhat less: 18 wounded in Qadasiyeh and three dead,
in Babylon more than 100 wounded and 18 dead, including nine
children in the Hilla district (from which, by chance, Mr Sahaf
himself comes). But this provoked an obvious question.
Why did the bus not take us to the hospitals
to talk to the 125 wounded rather than the empty women's college
with its broken windows and four uncommunicative cows? Of course,
bureaucracy here works in Ottoman fashion, no more so than in
this former capital of the Caliphs. Someone in authority had
the bright idea of allowing Arab cameramen for Reuters and the
Associated Press to travel to Babylon to take video footage of
the aftermath of a battle that the Iraqis claim to have fought
successfully. And that was that. Mr Sahaf's most dramatic moment,
however, came at the start of his daily press conference when
he said American aircraft had attacked two buses on the highway
between Baghdad and Amman carrying western "human shields",
including Europeans and Americans. "The brave Americans
have started shooting at the Americans--and Europeans of different
nationalities," he announced--not, I thought, without some
satisfaction at further evidence of American "barbarism".
But then again, we know as a fact that the Americans attacked
a Syrian bus last week just after it had crossed the frontier
into Iraq, reportedly killing five passengers. And the British
soldier whose own unit was attacked by US "friendly fire"
last week--he also condemned the air assault for endangering
Iraqi civilians--described the American pilot as a "cowboy".
Anything, in other words, could be true.
It's getting hotter in Baghdad--in every
sense of the word--and in one month the temperature will rise
to 35C. The dense black shroud of oil smoke that covers the city
is now creating a sinister fog--peace activists have not yet
complained of the damage this may do to the health of Iraqi children--which
makes even the mildest of air raids into things of mystery. At
4.45pm yesterday came the sound of jets yet again, followed by
a series of short, sharp explosions that lasted for up to a minute.
They sounded all too familiar to my ears, the rumble of cluster
bombs--legal against armour but decidedly illegal if used against
civilians. I stared for 10 minutes through the smoke from a high-rise
apartment block, to no avail. Whether the bombs were dropped
in the suburbs, on a military barracks or in a built-up area
was not possible to discover.
Nor is the status of Baghdad in this
war. Far from being besieged, its main roads north and south
are open--a few trains are still leaving for northern cities--and
although US troops were reported to have set up a checkpoint
on the road west to Amman, they appear to have been a "flying
column", stopping trucks and cars for a few hours and then
vanishing into the desert at night.
By evening, Vice-President Ramadan was
back--he has the intriguing habit of never looking at anyone
who asks him a question--to insist that 6,000 Arab volunteers
have arrived in Iraq to fight the Americans and British, half
of them anxious for "martyrdom".
Mr Ramadan repeated yet again Iraq had
no weapons of mass destruction and spent some time claiming the
Americans and British might plant such weapons in Iraq to fool
the world and justify their invasion. The Saudi Foreign Minister,
Prince Saud al-Faisal, was Mr Ramadan's--and thus Saddam's--target.
"He has offered advice--which is something he is in the
habit of doing--and his advice is he would like to see our leader
leave his post," Mr Ramadan thundered. "Let me tell
this lackey, this stooge, this small entity--they know full well
who his cousin is, the so-called Prince [Ambassador] Bandar in
Washington, and who he works for. Let them [the Saudis] say to
him: 'Go to hell. All we wish for is that you do not have an
Arab name...' Let me tell you, you are too small, too much of
a nothing, to say a word to the leader of Iraq. Those who give
up will be swept away from the land of the Arabs." Which
did little for Iraqi-Saudi relations.
Today's
Features
William
S. Lind
The Pitfalls of War Planning
Jorge
Mariscal
Latinos on the Frontlines, Again
Paul
de Rooij
Arrogant Propaganda
Jo
Wilding
From Baghdad: "I Am His Mother"
Tarif
Abboushi
Operation Embedded Folly
Lee
Sustar
Labor's War at Home
Akiva Eldar
Israeli Dreams of Iraqi Oil
Bernard
Weiner
The Vietnam Connection
Robert
Fisk
The Graveyard at Baghdad's North
Gate
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/01
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